The unanticipated explosion: Private higher education's global surge

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 217-240

  Levy, Daniel C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746011905     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/500694     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. A new bibliography shows how interest and publications grow, while very few works have comparative or conceptual scope. See Alma Maldonado et al., Private Higher Education: An International Bibliography (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2004).
2. The two key, single-authored books that attempt to understand private higher education beyond just one country were both published in 1986: Roger L. Geiger, Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986);
3. Daniel C. Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin America: Private Challenges to Public Dominance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
4. Recent books with mostly rather quick looks at private higher education in selected countries include Philip. G. Altbach, ed., Private Prometheus: Private Higher Education and Development in the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999);
5. Philip G. Altbach and Daniel C. Levy, eds., Private Higher Education: A Global Revolution (Rotterdam: Sense Publications, 2005). Overall, see the background paper, working papers, data, news features, and other materials on the PROPHE Web site: http://www.albany.edu/~prophe/.
6. PROPHE data also show countertrends, mostly mild but worth monitoring, where the private percentage falls after surging. This is most important for Eastern and Central Europe. The countertrend there has to do with declining demographics and increased public competitiveness (including through its own semiprivatization). In certain Asian countries, such as China and Mongolia, it is partly about the public reform but mostly about rapid public growth, even alongside still rapid private growth. Furthermore, delayed regulation (including accreditation) leads to the closing of some private institutions in several countries; on Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda, see http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/prophe/publication/NewsArticle.html.
7. The mix of choice and constraint merits ongoing research in the public sector as well. Close to my theme would be attention to the public sector's degree of unanticipated, undirected role emergence, less characteristic than in the private sector but not insignificant. Relevant topics include (undirected) "academic drift" and the disorderly history of U.S. higher education development compared to Europe. See, e.g., Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
8. This approach will be less gratifying to many than zealous calls for private higher education to fulfill or assume-whether voluntarily or through rules thrust upon it-a role of academic excellence or of serving society.
9. Neither this geographically broad approach nor a tighter case studies approach is inherently superior. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, which shift as our knowledge builds. Rather than being mutually exclusive, the two approaches should complement and aid one another over time.
10. Aside from the private higher education literature, there are other pertinent literatures both within and beyond higher education. For example, a literature on organizations has much to say about the birth of new organizations, transformation versus persistence in existing organizations, and what factors (e.g., technology and funding) shape organizations' functioning. Most of the specific discussion of roles, however, concerns actors inside organizations, including groups' or individuals' conflicting or changing roles. See Stephen Barley, "Technology as an Occasion for Structuring," Administrative Science Quarterly 31 (1986): 78-108;
11. Blake E. Ashforth, Role Transitions in Organisational Life (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001).
12. On these higher education models, see Frans A. van Vught, Autonomy and Accountability in Government-University Relationship, Higher Education Policy Studies 106 (Enchede, Netherlands: CHEFS at the University of Twente, 1992), 13-23.
13. For one classic depiction of policy making in pluralist systems, see Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992).
14. The pluralist thrust links to the nature of nonprofit organizations that are not heavily tied to the state. This article is relevant to concepts and literature on the nature of the nonprofit sector, although it cannot elaborate on those connections. See, e.g., Helmut K. Anheier, "Themes in International Research on the Nonprofit Sector," Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 19 (Winter 1990): 317-91;
15. Walter W. Powell, ed., The Nonprofit Sector A Research Handbook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
16. Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin America, esp. chap. 2.
17. Most projections suggest that Latin America's higher education enrollments could roughly double again in the coming 10 years and would likely involve a further increase in the private share, but even a stagnant share would mean continued huge growth in absolute terms. The other leading region into the 1980s was Asia. See Tong-In Wongsothon and Yibing Wang, Private Higher Education in Asia and the Pacific (Bangkok: UNESCO, 1995).
18. But it is harder to generalize about Asian growth and roles because of the great variation across national cases. Several countries developed huge private sectors-Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, all between 76 and 78 percent-proportionally larger than almost any Latin American counterpart, but other countries maintained public monopolies. Japan and the Philippines are among the countries analyzed in Geiger's Private Sectors in Higher Education. While his work does not treat waves of growth, it identifies multiple private roles (mass based or peripheral or parallel to public roles);
19. the identifications by Geiger (Private Sectors in Higher Education)
20. and Levy (Higher Education and the State in Latin America)
21. mostly reinforce one another, although Geiger deals more with peripheral and parallel roles, whereas Levy deals more with elite and religious roles. See Simon Marginson, "Imagining Ivy: Pitfalls in the Privatization of Higher Education in Australia," Comparative Education Review 41, no. 4 (November 1997): 460-80.
22. One stark ethnic example came with the 1994 opening of a university in Macedonia using the Albanian language. The government used force, unsuccessfully, to shut down the institution, which then functioned despite not getting government approval until 2004. See http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/ prophe/publication/NewsArticle.html.
23. Several works from PROPHE now explore the mix of waves and subsectors, including hybrids. On Thailand, see Prachayani Praphamontripong, "Diversification within the Thai Private Sector," in Altbach and Levy, Private Higher Education, 151-53;
24. on Japan, see Makoto Nagasawa, "Gender Stratification in Japanese Private Higher Education," in Altbach and Levy, Private Higher Education, 125-28;
25. on Mexico, see Juan Carlos Silas, "Recognizing the Subsectors in Mexican Private Higher Education," in Altbach and Levy, Private Higher Education, 241-43.
26. These Australian, Turkish, and Russian examples involve attempts to achieve elite roles with academically strong universities of some breadth. Outside the United States, such roles rarely have been achieved or even pursued, although public university difficulties (as in Turkey) have offered openings. Additionally, as the Russian case indicates, a second-tier status is possible, where private institutions slip in behind public leaders yet ahead of most institutions, or they seek elite status in niches. South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines also illustrate this pattern, common in that it has examples in many countries, but uncommon in that it does not depict the majority of private institutions (especially small ones). These countries also illustrate a variant of elite roles in which the elite nature is largely socioeconomic, with academic elite status limited to teaching (without advanced research) and just to certain fields of study. Such variants push us to think about mixes of elite and nonelite roles and to explore semi-elite institutions.
27. An alternative occurs (e.g., Russia, Romania, and Kenya) where public institutions allow in extra students as paying students alongside the nonpaying (or low-paying) students.
28. Choice is more often identified with waves leading to culturally distinctive or to elite universities. In the first, students choose a religious or other value preference, and in the second, they choose something perceived as superior to the public mode in academic, social, or economic terms. In contrast, demand absorption has been depicted more as the access option for those who lack choice. But that categorization underplays the growing frequency with which students who can gain admission to nonelite public higher education choose semi- or nonelite private higher education, often for job and other economic or social-cultural considerations. Scholars need to analyze the unfolding mixes of choice and access involved in emerging private roles in different countries. For an economic perspective on why nonprofit privates grow in education, through excess and differentiated demand, see Estelle James, The Private Nonprofit Provision of Education," in The Nonprofit Sector in International Perspective, ed. E. James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 61-65.
29. Especially in developing countries, this critique often overlooks the frequency of public higher education executing functions other than the enshrined ones of academic leadership or advanced professional training. See Claudio de Moura Castro and Daniel C. Levy, Myth, Reality, and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). The belittling of the job orientation expresses a view that knowledge should be for its own sake, not materialism. In contrast, private higher education's view of religious or other values is often more benign. Where prospective roles have already been debated publicly, their eventual emergence may involve only limited surprise, but often the debate mostly follows the emergence.
30. For private versus public data on matters such as faculty's highest degree or full-time status and on student fields of study, see the individual country tables at http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/prophe/data/countrydata.html.
31. A minority of the for-profit effort is more elite. Legal for-profit status appears unlikely to overlap with basic religious or other value-centered orientations. In South Africa, the religious institutions constitute a nonprofit presence within a private sector that is predominantly for-profit; see Daniel C. Levy, "Commercial Private Higher Education: South Africa as a Stark Example," Perspectives in Education 20, no. 4 (2002): 29-40.
32. In the Philippines, where private higher education is mostly demand absorbing and shows our typical low-cost "product mix" with commercial fields and part-time professors, the religious institutions are nonprofits aiming rather high academically; see Estelle James, "Private Higher Education: The Philippines as a Prototype," Higher Education 21 (1991): 189-206.
33. Private higher education institutions in the United States with religious roles also populate the nonprofit subsector (which is the predominant one in the U.S. private sector). Ukraine, Jordan, Peru, and Brazil are among other countries with legally for-profit higher education. For the first comparative analysis of for-profit higher education, see Kevin Kinser and Daniel C. Levy, "The For-Profit Sector: U.S. Patterns and International Echoes in Higher Education," in International Handbook of Higher Education, ed. J. Forest and P. G. Altbach (Dordrecht: Kluwer Publications, 2006), 107-20.
34. China's 2002 law on private education still restricts education to nonprofits but liberalizes moneymaking and allows training and other teaching institutions to operate as for-profit "businesses." Brazil and Peru, both with ample private higher education and widespread recognition that many de jure nonprofit institutions were de facto for-profit, legalized the for-profit form in the 1990s.
35. Regarding Ukraine, e.g., Joseph Stetar, Higher Education Innovation and Reform: Ukrainian Private Higher Education, 1991-1996 (South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University, distributed by the U.S. Information Service, Vienna, 1996), refers to a legislative vacuum and the absence of clear rules on how to establish institutions, although licensing and accreditation were established. Vietnam had nonpublic institutions before 1993 measures provided legal approval. China recognized the legal standing of private education in 1995 at the National People's Congress, and regulations were issued a few years later, but legal status remained tenuous at least until the 2002 private education law. In other countries, private institutions await official authorization. South Africa's legal and regulatory reach remains unclear and subject to fears, claims, and counterclaims. India is another contentious example, with active Supreme Court involvement. For legal provisions on several countries, see http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/prophe/data/countrylaw.html.
36. Pressure from higher education interest groups, even where not blocking private higher education, may keep it from certain high-status activities. Private institutions often function at UNESCO's level 5, rather than the traditional level 6 first degree. Only 173 of China's 1,277 private higher education institutions can grant a degree, of which 164 can do so only at the associate level; see Yangchun Mou, "Number of Higher Education Institutions," in The 2004 Almanac of China's Education (Beijing: People's Education, 2005). In South Africa, ambiguity and debate concern such categories, and some would hold private institutions to just the further-education level. So, private institutions often emerge before the higher education system has clear rules defining the scope and process.
37. The international trend also spans additional types of private higher education and new variants. Both elite and religious higher education institutions, usually from advanced countries, have opened branches and recognized courses in other countries. The startling reach of institutions such as Monterrey Tech, not only in Mexico but also into South America and the United States, shows that developed countries do not monopolize energetic private international penetration.
38. Andres Bernasconi, "Organizational Diversity in Chilean Higher Education: Faculty Regimes in Private and Public Universities" (PhD diss., Boston University, 2003).
39. The growth of chains or other networks of higher education institutions-whether domestic or international or a combination-introduces another sense of planning, but planning that is sometimes internationally "above" government planning and usually institutionally "below" it. Government comes into the picture more to decide how much to ignore, explicitly allow, or block such planning. Meanwhile, the role of international development banks deserves more scrutiny regarding private higher education growth. Certainly the banks and notably the International Finance Corporation (spun out from the World Bank) have promoted privatization but often more pointedly in regard to public sector reform than in private institutional growth per se, and they have noted a link between massive private growth and problematic quality. See Task Force on Higher Education and Society, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000);
40. Inter-American Development Bank, "Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean" (strategy paper, Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, DC, 1997).
41. Also in several North African and Middle Eastern countries, notably in the Gulf, governments are promoting private growth for purposes of both enrollment expansion and elite options; see http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/ prophe/publication/NewsArticle.html. Other governments (e.g., Russia) have moved from basic noninvolvement to promotion of public-private partnerships; see Dmitry Suspitsin, "Between a Rock of the State and a Hard Place of the Market: Sources of Sponsorship and Legitimacy in Russian Non-state Higher Education," in In Search of Legitimacy: Private Higher Education in Post-Communist Countries, ed. Snejana Slantcheva and Daniel C. Levy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
42. An example more related to elite growth occurs when government officials decide that the private growth is an economic, social, or even partial political boon and tacitly plan a relative neglect of public universities.
43. The Philippines moved from laissez-faire to regulations in 1969 but recently to deregulation: see Mark Bray, "Financing Higher Education: Patterns, Trends, and Options," Prospects 30, no. 3 (2000): 331-48.
44. Paul Beresford-Hill, ed., Education and Privatisation in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Republics (Wallingford, UK; Triangle Books, 1998).
45. Compared to civil law counterparts, common-law societies have more often created nonprofit institutions through voluntary (nonstate) efforts and resources oriented to competitive markets; see Anheier, "Themes in International Research on the Nonprofit Sector," 377.
46. See Slantcheva and Levy, In Search of Legitimacy.
47. M. Mabizela, Daniel C. Levy, and Wycliffe Otieno, eds., "Private Surge amid Public Dominance: Dynamics in the Private Provision of Higher Education in Africa," special issue, Journal of Higher Education in Africa (forthcoming).
48. The privatizing consequences also include increased private finance and management of legally public institutions, a topic beyond this focus on legally private institutions. A pertinent observation here, however, is that central policy rarely directs private higher education, even where it directs a privatization of existing public institutions, including systemwide imposition of tuition fees.
49. Although my concept of reemergence requires that private higher education existed earlier, most countries have private precedent, insofar as many higher education institutions were historically more mixed or fused private-public entities than the clearly public forms that came to dominate later. See the next note.
50. The United States is the extreme case in which private higher education developed at least as early as public higher education. However, analysts often exaggerate the atypical nature of the U.S. case in this respect, as many countries had elements or forms of private higher education (and other levels of education) before they had clearly public forms; see Daniel C. Levy, "The Rise of Private Universities in Latin America and the United States," in Sociology of Education Expansion, ed. Margaret Archer (London: Sage, 1982), 93-132.
51. See Gabriel Roth (The Private Provision of Public Services in Developing Countries, ed. World Bank [Washington, DC: Oxford University Press, 1987]) on the broad sweep of goods that historically came through private providers, although they then became widely perceived as appropriately delivered publicly.
52. In Turkey, however, leading new private (nonprofit) universities aspire to elite roles, whereas earlier Turkish private higher education was academically unimposing and for-profit; see Ayse Oncu, "Higher Education as a Business: Growth of a Private Sector in Turkey" (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971).
53. On China, seejin Lin, Social Transformation and Private Education in China (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
54. And on the critical legitimacy challenges in Russia and the sense of Russian private growth against expectations, public opinion, and regulations, see Suspitsin, "Between a Rock of the State and a Hard Place of the Market." That the entrepreneurialism can extend to fields other than common ones like business is shown, e.g., by the inclusion of medicine and other expensive fields in Chile.
55. The Chilean example from the previous note also works here. The broader point is that role changes within extant sectors are often surprises, even stunning ones. An example in China and South Africa is the evolution of novel (and controversial) partnerships between extant private colleges and public universities. Another example is the effort by some academically maligned institutions to use resources generated from profitable fields to cross-subsidize costly fields and thus to build broader academic credibility.
56. In some postcommunist, African, and other cases, the state weakens overall and lacks the will or capacity to run many significant aspects of social and economic change, so societal space opens for private initiatives outside detailed and overarching policy for higher education. In other instances, the state diminishes its financial role but attempts to steer systems or to demand increased accountability, including at times from private sectors. These examples reinforce the point that even where private higher education surges unexpectedly, we may then appreciate how the surge is consistent with broad changes outside higher education.
57. On Australia, see Marginson, "Imagining Ivy," 468;
58. on New Zealand, see Malcolm Abbott, "Private Higher Education Penetration into a Mature Education Market: The New Zealand Experience," Working Paper no. 6 (PROPHE, University at Albany, 2005);
59. on Japan, see Akiyoshi Yonezawa, "Towards the New Relationship between Japanese Public and Private Higher Education," working paper (PROPHE, University at Albany, forthcoming).
60. David Breneman, Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered? (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994).
61. Kinser and Levy, "For-Profit Sector."
62. Richard S. Ruch, Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise of the For-Profit University (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001);
63. Kathleen F. Kelly, Meeting Needs and Making Profits: The Rise of Far-Profit Degree-Granting Institutions (Denver: Education Commission of the States, 2001).
64. Several works by William Zumeta (e.g., "Enrollment Patterns in Private, Nonprofit Higher Education, 1980-1995" [working paper, Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, 1999])
65. track and analyze the shifting contours of the U.S. private higher education sector. On the shift from religious to secular, see Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)
66. and on a liberal arts conversion to job-market roles, see Breneman, Liberal Arts Colleges.
67. Also, if we look back to the early formation of the U.S. private sector, even prenationhood, the reality is mostly one of individual institutional histories, not a planned sector; see John S. Whitehead, The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776-1876 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
68. Something similar holds regarding the subsequent rise of private universities; see Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) ;
69. Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004).
70. Daniel C. Levy, "When Private Higher Education Does Not Bring Organizational Diversity: Argentina, China, Hungary," in Altbach, Private Prometheus, 13-43
71. and "How Private Higher Education's Growth Challenges the New Institutionalism," in The New Institutionalism in Education, ed. H. Meyer and B. Rowan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).
72. Daniel C. Levy, "Legitimacy and Privateness: Eastern and Central Europe in International Perspective," in Slantcheva and Levy, In Search of Legitimacy.
73. See http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/prophe/data/countrydata.html.
74. On the labor-market claims and efforts of the private universities, see Yingxia Cao, "Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China" (PhD diss., University at Albany, forthcoming).
75. Especially in systems where the legitimacy of private institutions and their novel activity is challenged and lacks solid legal status, private leaders may portray their roles as less distinctive than they are-less deviant from public norms and expectations. As in Ukraine, Russia, and China, private leaders (like surprised, uncertain, or cautious government officials) officially avoid the word "private" in favor of nebulous terms such as "people-run" and "nonstate"; see Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, "The Perplexed World of Russian Private Schools," Comparative Education 37, no. 1 (2001); 43-64. Fewer countries have traditional biases in favor of private activity, which incentivize private leaders to exaggerate the distinctiveness of their institutions' roles.
76. The state may even promote certain distinctive roles, as when it blocks private pursuit of traditional academic roles while encouraging its pursuit of novel nonuniversity roles.
77. Interest group lobbying often feeds off and exacerbates internal differences within the state (as when finance ministries are more sympathetic than education ministries to the growth of distinctive private roles). Such internal differences further undermine a sense of coherent designing of systems.
78. We cannot draw many conclusions about the degree of pluralism in higher education systems overall, since our exploration has focused on just the private sector and its explosive growth, but we have repeatedly tied the pluralist hue there to wider pluralist dynamics in functioning. For a broader treatment of pluralist higher education models, see Daniel C. Levy, "Pluralist Principles in Higher Education: International Challenges for Reforming Systems and States," in Educación superior: Desafío global y respuesta nacional, ed. Luis Enrique Orozco (Bogota: Universidad de Los Andes, 2001), 48-65.
79. It may also be sobering for scholars, governments, or publics that want to tell private higher education to do this or that activity.